There is a good chance that you have already heard of the Pittsburgh-based Terrance Hayes. As a recipient of a prestigious 2014 MacArthur “Genius” Grant, his eminence has spread from the Pittsburgh circuit into the national arena. Awarded to Hayes for his accomplishments in poetry, the MacArthur Fellowship is bestowed to 21 people annually in recognition of outstanding achievement across disciplines. The award comes with a prize of $625,000 paid out over five years.
Now more in demand than ever to give readings and master classes across the country, Hayes, a professor in Pitt's Writing program and an MFA alumnus, was kind enough to make time in his mid-semester conference schedule to talk with The Fifth Floor about painting, poetry, and yes, the MacArthur.
Hayes grew up in South Carolina and attended Coker College on a basketball scholarship, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1994. He received his MFA in poetry from Pitt in 1997 and proceeded to teach at Xavier University of Louisiana for three years, then at Carnegie Mellon University for 12. In 2013, he joined Pitt’s Writing program as a professor of poetry.
He did not initially intend to be a poet, however. When he attended Coker College, he was a fine arts major concentrating in painting. He attributed the shift in focus to money: “I could afford [poetry],” he said. “I thought [poetry] would be cheaper than going to graduate school for painting because in addition to getting in, I’d need all this money for supplies.”
But painting is something Hayes has kept up with. Throughout the years, he has attended studio classes in Pittsburgh, going in at 10 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon to work on his art. Patrick Daughtery, a teacher at the studio Hayes paints at and the museum director at the Frank L. Melega Art Museum, was very encouraging of Hayes and persuaded him to do an exhibition at the Brownsville, Penna., museum.
“I really wasn’t doing much more than sitting in the corner and painting, but [Patrick] took an interest and had access to that space. He asked a couple of times and finally I said OK. So I did [the exhibition] and there were some contests in the area that I have done, but it’s all been at his encouragement.”
The exhibition was titled “Render” and ran in the fall of 2013 at the Melega.
All of the artwork on Hayes’ poetry books is his own, and the cover of his most recent book, How to Be Drawn, is a self-portrait. As with his 
poetry, Hayes enjoys working visually with the themes of masculinity and the male gaze. He paints primarily male portraits but has experimented with painting women and landscapes as well.
Although he is most certainly a lover of words, Hayes enjoys painting because it employs unmediated images. “I like that there are no words...because I work mostly with language, what excites me is not having to use it. And the same appeals to me with music. It’s the same idea—how much can you communicate without words?”
But of course, words are what Hayes loves the most. He writes almost every day, preferring to be a night owl and writing in his home office. Recognizing how challenging it can be to write, he doesn’t give himself many stipulations. “It’s so hard to write that you can’t really be too rigorous about what you write or how much you write,” he said, adding that the only rule he adheres to is not to repeat himself.
With all of his artistic pursuits, it is hard to believe that Hayes still has time to teach. But teaching, in fact, is one of the things Hayes enjoys the most.
“Teaching really is a joy for me. It’s where I get stimulated and come up with ideas and approaches,” he said. “It’s not that I’m a teacher because I’m a poet. Even if I wasn’t a poet, I’d still be some form of teacher because it suits my personality.”
This past semester, Hayes taught two undergraduate courses; however, he usually teaches graduate students as well. When asked which student level he prefers, Hayes confessed that he had a soft spot for undergrads: “What I like about teaching undergrads is the idea that they don’t quite know how good they are... . You want them to be free and loose and expressive and realize all of the things they can talk about. There’s really no downside to that.”
As for his approach to teaching grad students versus teaching undergrads, Hayes says there is a difference in the way they talk about poetry in his graduate classes, as the students have had more education, but that he runs conferences and workshops generally the same.
“When I’m doing conferences, there is no difference because everybody’s the same. Whether you’re a twelfth grader or someone with 12 books, when you have a sheet of paper in front of you and you write a poem, any conversation around that is the same. It’s just reader to writer. All kinds of rankings are gone.”
And finally, what about the MacArthur? How has life changed for him since?
Unlike many winners, Hayes said he is not interested in using the prize money to take time off from teaching, but instead is considering donating it once he has been paid the final sum. He met a MacArthur fellow several years back who was a painter and had donated much of his winnings to a school, and Hayes found his contribution inspiring. He has several years to figure out what to do with it before he is paid in full, but in the meantime, Hayes is looking forward to the attention dying down.
“I hear from people all of the time because it’s a public thing—the number one of those people being my mom—so there’s a lot of figuring what to do, how to sponsor them, that sort of thing...but it’s tricky when it’s strangers.”
Above all, Hayes just wants things to get back to normal so that he can get back to his nightly writing routine, which has been disrupted since the award.
“I would like to get back to the circumstances that allowed me to be honored in this way. That’s the paradox of success, that sometimes success will take you from the thing that got you there, and that’s a big fear of mine. So I just want to maintain, as they say.”
—Channing Kaiser